Indian Summer Read online

  After they returned home, Dickie invited Edwina to meet his parents. Shortly afterwards, the new couple went on another holiday in Scotland, with various friends including Dickie’s princely cousins, David and Bertie. Dickie had been on the verge of proposing to Edwina when he received a severe shock. A telegram arrived with the unexpected news that his father had died following a heart attack. Dickie hastened back to his family. Days later, Edwina returned to London to comfort him. She had meant to go straight to Brook House to tell her grandfather and guardian, Sir Ernest Cassel, about her new boyfriend. On getting off the train, she discovered that she was a few hours too late. Cassel, too, had just died of a heart attack, as unexpectedly as had the Marquess of Milford Haven.32

  Under such circumstances, the blossoming romance deepened. When Dickie sailed for India with David, Edwina had been photographed standing on the quay between Dickie’s sister Louise and David’s brother Bertie, a soulful expression on her face.33 Later, Dickie had pressed Edwina to join him. ‘I need you so badly’, he wrote to her. ‘You just don’t know what a difference your coming out to India is going to make.’34 Unable yet to access her grandfather’s estate, Edwina borrowed £100 from her great-aunt for a second-class berth, and studied the passenger lists until she found the name of a vague acquaintance she could ask to act as her chaperone. A long, hot journey followed, through the Mediterranean and the Red Sea: ‘I just lay on my bunk with the ceiling fan slowly turning, and dreamed of the East,’ she remembered.

  As Edwina sailed towards Bombay, her beau moved on with the Prince of Wales to the troublesome city of Allahabad. For those on the tour, any remaining dreams of eastern promise were to be rudely interrupted. Here, the peaceful protest was to reach its zenith – despite the local magistrate’s efforts to keep the ringleaders caged by arresting Motilal Nehru and his thirty-two-year-old son, Jawahar.

  Since the days of being ‘a bit of a prig’, Jawahar had undergone a political epiphany. A group of peasants had come to Allahabad to beg the leaders of the freedom movement to take up their case against cruel and oppressive landlords. Jawahar agreed to visit their village and discuss their concerns. This three-day trip had transformed him from a shy and cosseted lawyer – who, by his own admission, was ‘totally ignorant’ of the conditions in which the great majority of Indians worked and lived – into a revolutionary. ‘Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame and sorrow,’ he wrote; ‘shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life and our petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty.’35

  By the time of the Prince of Wales’s tour, Jawahar had been confirmed as a rising star of the freedom movement, and one more radical than his august father. Motilal had been opposed to satyagraha in the first instance, and argued that the sending of a few individuals to prison would make little difference. In particular, he was unhappy with the thought of Jawahar ending up there. A doting father does not send his only beloved son to Harrow and Cambridge in the expectation that he will end up in a jailhouse. Yet Jawahar was determined to pursue satyagraha. Though even Gandhi advised him to do nothing that would upset Motilal, he could not be dissuaded. Father and son argued for several days. Jawahar pointedly began to eat bread and milk in the evenings from a steel bowl, amid the rest of the family’s crystal and Dresden china. Before one dinner he was fiddling with a piece of twine from a parcel, and commented: ‘I wonder what it feels like to have a noose round one’s neck?’ Swarup Rani nearly fainted; Motilal walked out and slammed the door. ‘Has this family no sense of humour left?’ asked Jawahar, crossly.36 That night, Motilal secretly tried sleeping on the floor, wanting to understand the hardship his son would suffer in prison.37

  On the evening of 6 December 1921, the Prince of Wales was in his train en route for Bharatpur. That same night, Jawahar was up late in the Congress office in Allahabad, when a clerk burst in with the news that they were surrounded by police and that the building was being searched. Jawahar maintained his cool – ‘it was my first experience of the kind, but the desire to show off was strong,’ he later admitted. He refused to flinch while the police went around tipping out files and arresting his colleagues. Eventually, provoked by the news that raids were taking place elsewhere in the city, he returned home to check on his family – only to find the police there too. Both Jawahar and Motilal were arrested.38 Between December 1921 and January 1922, the British authorities arrested an almost unbelievable total of 30,000 people in connection with the hartals.39 It was hard for them not to arrest even more. Jawahar’s sister Betty remembered that everyone was so keen to support Gandhi’s cause that ‘people who were not arrested would pile into prison vans, which arrived at the jails with more prisoners than the jailers expected or could handle. The officials were at their wits’ ends; what could you do with people like that?’40

  The arrest of the Nehrus stirred up Congress supporters across the United Provinces and beyond.41 Stories seeped through the tight ring of press censorship suggesting 600 arrests in Bombay, and rioting in Calcutta.42 When the Prince of Wales descended from his train at Allahabad on the 12 December, it was to an eerie hush. Allahabad had been a typical Indian city the day before, filled with noisy, colourful bazaars, bustling rickshaws, children playing and fighting, the fragrant smoke of burning incense, the bubbling of milk boiling for sweets, and the crackling of samosas being fried on roadside stalls. Now the streets were deserted, the houses shuttered. The city was a ghost town, with silent troops lining the empty streets, saluting the lonely state carriage that bore the uncelebrated prince. From a population of 150,000, only a couple of thousand spectators had turned out – and those that had were conspicuously white of skin.43 ‘It was a spooky experience,’ David later confessed. ‘I attempted to maintain a rigid and majestic pose in the carriage in order to show that I had risen above the insult. But curiosity got the better of me; and, peering up the empty side streets, I was gratified to see peeking furtively round the corners of the blocks the heads of many Indians.’44

  Though some locals were unable to resist stealing a glance at their future King-Emperor, there was no doubt that the people of Allahabad had administered a ringing slap to the princely face. Even the stalwart Times of India was forced to admit that, ‘There is no use blinking the fact that the non-co-operators have scored their first success.’45 A few days later, the contrast between unpopular raj and popular nationalism was made stark, when large numbers of Allahabad citizens turned out to support the Nehrus as they went on trial. Jawahar’s wife and mother were among the chosen few spectators who watched him go up before the magistrate. Four-year-old Indira sat on Motilal’s knee throughout the proceedings.46 Jawahar was accused of distributing notices asking people to observe a hartal, and responded by stating that he neither recognized the British government of India, nor regarded the court as legitimate. He described the proceedings as a farce, and refused to answer any further questions.47 The magistrate gave him six months in jail and a fine of 500 rupees, which he refused to pay. Motilal was given the same sentence, and both were carted off to Lucknow Prison.

  Now that the Nehru family was enjoying George V’s ‘hospitality’, it was ironic to reflect that, only shortly before, the district magistrate of Allahabad demanded that Motilal Nehru invite King George’s son to stay with him. Because Anand Bhavan was the grandest house in Allahabad, the government intended to requisition it for the prince’s use. Motilal had refused to comply.48 The Nehrus remained in prison until 3 March 1922, when the authorities belatedly discovered that there had been no law against distributing notices asking people to observe a hartal, and that therefore they had never actually committed a crime.49

  For Christmas, the royal party had moved on to the old capital of Calcutta. The authorities had prepared for hartals and riots – as well as going to great lengths to drum up cheering crowds. Offices of Congressmen and Muslim agitators were ra
ided; 200 sword-sticks were found in one dissenter’s house; 10,000 arrests were made in the ten days leading up to the prince’s arrival.50 The prince arrived to an unprecedented level of policing, with armoured cars patrolling the side streets and a cordon around the entire city. The city’s shops were shut, its taxis nowhere to be seen, and the roads lined thinly, with hardly any Indians visible. Even the generous British newspapers could only run to estimating 5000 spectators present, with 10,000 police guarding them. The protest passed off with only one or two minor riots in the suburbs.51

  The Prince of Wales ate Christmas dinner at Government House, alongside numerous state governors, their wives, their hopeful unmarried daughters, and a few approved Indians, including Captain Raja Sir Hari Singh, son of the Maharaja of Kashmir. A fairy-lit Boxing Day ball was held in honour of the royal guest. It was a dazzling event, and markedly multicoloured. Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Anglo-Indian guests mingled with British officials. Lady Ronaldshay wore a gown of heavy yellow crêpe de Chine; the Maharani of Burdwan wore a gown of gold tissue embossed with roses, with an overlaid sari of gold lace; Mrs Shelley Banerjee wore charmeuse trimmed with lace and jet; and Mrs Sunanda Sen wore purple brocade accented with golden sprigs of maidenhair fern. Dickie danced the foxtrot with Miss Scott, and the Calcutta One-Step with Miss Gamble.52

  After Christmas, David opened the Victoria Memorial Hall, a magnificent museum in Calcutta. He quoted his great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 about the Indians: ‘In their prosperity will be our strength; in their contentment our security; and in their gratitude our best reward.’ With impressive optimism, he added: ‘It is fitting that this memorial to the Great Queen-Empress should be opened at a time when her dreams for the Indian Empire have come true.’53 Perhaps, among the fashionable and integrated elites of Calcutta, it was possible to believe that they had.

  On 13 January, the prince arrived at the wealthy city of Madras. A complete hartal had been planned, but did not come off in the manner Gandhi would have intended. As Dickie wrote, ‘As in Bombay, so here, on finding that their Non-Violence system produced no results they resorted to Violence.’54 It ended up as a riot, with troops and policemen stoned, cars and buildings vandalized. British troops were forced to use armoured cars and bayonets just a stone’s throw from where the prince was staying at Government House. In the heart of the European quarter, the mob came across a pavilion decorated with flags and palms, under the protection of a solitary policeman. They knocked him over and destroyed the decorations, trampling the torn remnants of the Union Jack into the mud. They smashed up and attempted to burn down the Wellington cinema and a car showroom next door. A British journalist was horrified to discover a dead body with its head beaten in, lying in the road outside the cinema.55 Dickie reported another casualty: a Government House taxi deliberately ran over a man aiming a brick through the windscreen, ‘leaving him a somewhat shapeless mass in the road’.56

  By the next day, order had been restored and the prince was cheered at the races.57 Swiftly, the tour got back on track. On 15 January, Dickie went to visit the Theosophical Society in Madras, which was presided over by the eccentric Baroness de Kuster, a friend of his sister. The baroness attempted to explain reincarnation and astral projection to a sceptical Dickie, and imparted to him that Annie Besant had recently identified the future Emperor of India, David, as the reincarnation of a former Emperor of India, Akbar the Great. ‘David was not over-pleased at the idea of having been a “black man”, so I did not inform him that his soul had previously been shared by a group of horses,’ Dickie noted.58

  The royal tour ground on, zigzagging up through the belly of India and stopping in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Indore. By 4 February, it had reached Bhopal, where Dickie and David were the guests of the only woman ruler in Asia, the Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum. The Begum was an ardent Muslim, and usually ruled from behind a purdah screen. The rare sight of her tiny figure, swathed in a blue burka, next to the white-uniformed Prince of Wales, gave the tour’s photographers some of their best opportunities.59 But it was an image more connected to the past than to the future. Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement had reached a crescendo. Protests against the prince had been extensive, and had come from all quarters of Indian society – crossing boundaries of wealth, caste and religion. Elsewhere in the Empire, colonies were being offered self-government. The provisional government of the Irish Free State had just met for the first time, under the leadership of freedom fighter Michael Collins. Collins had, controversially, accepted a form of dominion status within the British Empire, providing a model for what might shortly be offered to India. The Irish Free State was not to prove a resounding success, but its inception revealed an empire shifting gear from conquest to retreat.

  Gandhi could have had every expectation of a swift victory. Best of all, the British were just about to do the worst thing possible from their point of view and arrest him. Gandhi’s imprisonment would be met with an international outcry; his trial would make headlines all over the world; inevitably, he would have to be released, and subsequently listened to. This would put the British in exactly the same position as they had recently occupied in Ireland, where they had had to overlook Michael Collins’s terrorist activities and negotiate with him. Gandhi would be offered a deal, just as Collins had been offered a deal. All he had to do was stand firm.60

  It came as some surprise, then, that Gandhi did not stand firm. Instead, he called off the non-cooperation movement, cancelled all further agitation against the British and backed down, declaring that his followers had sinned against God; that to continue the campaign would be to obey Satan; and that India was not ready for self-government. His reason was a single incident of mob violence that occurred in the small town of Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces, the day after the Prince of Wales had been photographed with the Begum of Bhopal.

  Gandhi was nowhere near Chauri Chaura at the time of the incident: he was 800 miles away in Bardoli. But the facts that were reported to him three days later overwhelmed him with a sense of personal responsibility. A peaceful demonstration had been taking place in the town. The Indian constables policing it had attacked some demonstrators. The demonstrators had turned on the constables; this had upped the stakes, and the constables shot into the crowd. When their bullets ran out, they ran to the police station for shelter. The demonstrators surrounded the station, set fire to it, and burned the constables alive. Twenty-two policemen were killed.61

  The event differed neither in character nor greatly in scale from the previous riots in Bombay or Madras. Yet something about Chauri Chaura particularly upset Gandhi. ‘Let the opponent glory in our humiliation or so called defeat,’ he wrote. ‘It is better to be charged with cowardice and weakness than to be guilty of denial of our oath and to sin against God.’62 He went on a five-day fast to purify himself, and withdrew from all further satyagraha activities, with the exception of the boycott on British goods. He declared an intention to concentrate henceforth on ‘constructive’ activities: absolute non-violence; the setting-up of Congress organizations in every village; a spinning-wheel in every home; the rejection of ornamentation; Hindu–Muslim unity; ‘purification’ of the Hindus by abstention from drink and drugs; and ‘killing the snake of untouchability’.63 Put simply, these were unachievable aims. The British themselves could not have drawn up a more prohibitive list of conditions against their own departure.

  Gandhi’s sudden withdrawal sent the British into a panic. Sir George Lloyd, the Governor of Bombay, was ready to take him into custody. Back in London, Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, was preparing to announce the Mahatma’s arrest in the House of Commons. But it was obviously absurd to arrest an agitator immediately after he had stopped agitating. The Viceroy, Lord Reading, summoned his emergency council, but it could not reach a decision. In the end, he himself made the call. Soon after midnight, his secretary telegraphed a coded message to London, informing Montagu that the arrest was off.64


  Lloyd was so furious he threatened to resign, and later declared, with a touch of hyperbole, that ‘Gandhi’s was the most colossal experiment in world history, and it came within an inch of succeeding.’65 But his shock, confusion and anger could not compare to that felt by Gandhi’s own followers. ‘The drastic reversal of practically the whole of the aggressive programme may be politically unsound and unwise,’ Gandhi told them with lucid self-awareness, ‘but there is no doubt that it is religiously sound.’66 Jawaharlal Nehru, still languishing in a British jail for his own part in the satyagraha campaign, was devastated. Fifteen years later, the sense of disappointment was still tangible when he argued that ‘the non-violent method was not, and could not be, a religion or an unchallengeable creed or dogma. It could only be a policy and a method promising certain results, and by those results it would have to be finally judged. Individuals might make of it a religion or incontrovertible creed. But no political organization, so long as it remained political, could do so.’67

  The split between Nehru and Gandhi was deeply damaging for Congress. Nehru, who declared that religion ‘filled me with horror’ and was ‘the enemy of clear thought’, had never signed up to fight a holy war; Gandhi, who believed that ‘no man can live without religion’ and that ‘those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means’, could never have envisaged anything else.68 Exhilarated though he had been by Gandhi’s whirlwind arrival on the political scene, Nehru quickly realized that the Mahatma’s argument provided the British with the permanent means to defeat him.